Regular readers of this blog will no doubt be able to tell you that I admit to not being much good in the kitchen. My Cerebral Palsy means that I struggle to do a lot of cooking for myself, although I will have you all know that I’m a complete whizz with the microwave (as long as the things that I put in aren’t too heavy).

One of the things that I find hardest, next to lifting heavy pans and carrying them around, is chopping things up for myself.  I know that there’s the option to buy pre-cut things. I often do this when it comes to veggies because I’m always adding these to something else, but when it comes to fruit I really wish that I could just buy a bag of apples and cut them up when I felt like it, rather than having to buy six individual packets of one prepared one. I know that I could just simply bite into it instead, but I had braces when I was a teenager and now I hate doing that.  Plus, I think it would be good if I could master things cutting them up business for myself.

A while ago, I met an Occupational Therapist who said that she could get hold of some chopping boards with spikes on for me to have a go at using to see if they helped. She did this a couple of weeks back actually, but I’ve been so busy posting about my on-going serial casting treatment that I haven’t had a chance to post it yet. If you want to find out how that’s going, then you can find all my posts about it so far here.

One of them that she was able to loan me was this one here, which has a small circle of spikes to put things on while I tried to hack into them. I decided to use a small, soft and probably slightly passed its best, peach and a small apple. I wasn’t planning on eating these after because I knew that there would probably be nothing left by the time I was done with them.

I would like to point out at this point that this post is written entirely from my own experience and what works/doesn’t work well for me won’t be the same for everybody, this is just what it was like for me personally. I decided to try using this after talking to an occupation therapist.  I’m not a medical professional so I cannot say if these would work well/be suitable for anyone but myself, so therefore this post should not be used as a replacement for medical advice.

The peach didn’t work as well as I was hoping that it would. I thought that I would find that the easier of the two to cut, but I think that the stone may have made it more difficult for me. I found it hard to press in down on to the spikes and it kept wobbling around. I still managed to cut it a bit, but I gave up in the end because I was afraid that I might cut myself. I doubt that I would  have done, I think it was just a confidence thing, but I felt I had done the best I could anyway.

The apple went better than expected thought. I still found it hard to push it down onto the prongs very far, and it took me a couple of tries but I did it. It was a good job that it wasn’t a larger one though because I’m not sure that t would have balanced as well. I think it would have needed a few more spikes.

However, I did managed to slice the thing clean in two which I have never been able to do before so I was pretty pleased with that one, so it made me think that it might be worth getting myself one after all.

I think that I should also say that I found it much, much easier to clean than any of the other cutting boards that we have at home, because it was much smaller and lighter. I found it much easier to get in and out of the sink and I wasn’t as worried about dropping it.

I’m glad that I was given the chance to experiment with some before I buy some because it’s made me realise that some things will still be a challenge, and that I would like a bigger spiky section that the one on these boards.